Standing Guard against the Sentinel

Posted on Wed Feb 8th, 2023 @ 11:15 by Claire Cavendish & Oliver Bloomfield
Edited on on Wed Feb 8th, 2023 @ 11:22

Chapter: Prologue: Dawn of Avalon
Location: Oliver's dorm room, Avalon Institute
Timeline: Friday, 25th of September, Evening
1461 words - 2.9 OF Standard Post Measure

The forest was normally a place of peace and serenity for Oliver. The smells of fresh fallen rain that rejuvenated the tallest trees and the smallest moss, the sounds of the birds greeting the morning, or the owls greeting the night. A rodent scurrying in the underbrush. He didn't quite remember how he got there, or why he was in the forest near his parents' house, but his heart was racing and he knew he had to run.

The trees cracked like matchsticks behind him as heavy footfalls were close behind. "Oliver Bloomfield. Seize your resistance." The booming voice echoed across the forest, birds flying up and away from the impending doom. The huge purple menace stomping through the trees, not caring whether it trampled them. Unimpeded by them as if it was walking through grass that hadn't been cut for slightly too long. An iron tendril shot from the robot's hand and caught Oliver's ankle, with a quick yank he was lifted from the ground and in its palm.

"Miss D'Angelo!" Oliver yelled, his voice petering out quickly. The silhouetted figure that he thought had to be Reagan started to walk away from him and the robot, seemingly uncaring for what happened to him. He reached down and tried to pull towards the trees and the plants beneath him, making them grow and reach up. The forest tried to grasp onto the robot with their branches and vine, but when the thrusters fired and it lifted off the branches of hundred year old trees snapped like they were twigs freshly fallen in an autumn storm. "HELP ME!" Oliver yelled again as he felt the hand tighten around him.

Claire suddenly saw the small potted plant next to Oliver's bed jerk and reach for the young man in the bed growing thicker and longer to try and reach him. He couldn't have been asleep for more than twenty minutes. She got up from the unoccupied bed on the other end of the room. He'd get his own roommate but for tonight she felt it was best that he had an adult in the room with him. Not just for his piece of mind but for hers as well. She moved close to him and knelt down next to the bed and gently shook his shoulders. "Oliver. It's alright. You're safe." She shook again, a little less gently now. The boy had been exhausted but she couldn't bare knowing he might be in deep distress, having a nightmare.

With a start Oliver woke up and tears immediately filled his eyes. "It caught me, the purple iron man grabbed me, Miss Cavendish!" He instinctively reached out his hands. It was only the first day of school, but these people had already saved him from what had surely caught him had he still lived at home. The scenario in his dream would've been a realistic outcome if that had been the case.

The head mistress pulled him into an embrace and held him close. "You're safe now. We stopped it. They won't make that mistake again." Claire tried to reassure him that everything was going to be alright. Hand making small circles on his back. The kids in the school were usually very tough and tumble. They had learnt to be in the outside world where they were judged, sometimes persecuted, for who they were. Oliver had been a very independent boy when she had come to his mother's house earlier this summer. Her connections within social services paying off and preventing that he'd be put into the foster care system. "We're here to protect you, Oliver."

The kid slowly slipped his hands around the purple woman holding him close, starting to sob into the cotton of her shirt. "It felt so real. Miss D'Angelo couldn't hear me. Where were they going to take me? Why was it after me?"

Claire shook her head and rested her chin on the top of his head. "I don't know, love." She planted a kiss on the top of his hair. It wasn't professional, and it definitely blurred the lines between her roles as a head mistress and a primary caregiver, but in this moment only one thing mattered. Oliver.

Oliver pulled tightly, clearly not wanting to let go.

"There's a lot of people that seek to understand and help and love out there. There's unfortunately also quite a lot of them that seek to suppress and destroy and hate." Claire wasn't quite sure where she was going with that line of thought. "Sometimes the people that hate think they can win out." She pulled back a bit to look Oliver in the eyes, "But today love won out, and as long as we keep meeting fear and hatred with love and understanding one day there won't be a need for a place like Avalon."

Slowly the young boy nodded at her words. They were soothing and reassuring even if some of the sentiment was kind of scary.

"Until then know that Miss D'Angelo, Mister Johnston, Mister Monroe, Miss Hunter, Mister Johnson, Mister Jackson, Miss Ashton, and everyone else will be here to stand between whatever robot or wizard or giant lizard they throw at us."

"Even the mean Chef?"

It was clear the kids had found each other on the train and had talked to each other. Claire smiled a bit at the fact that the cranky French chef had clearly become a bit of an urban legend among the kids. She was sure a lot of stories were doing the rounds about his abilities, and the ingredients in his school lunches. "Especially him." She hugged him close again. "He'd probably throw in some colourful French as well for good measure." She slowly let go of the kid and leaned back a bit to try and encourage him to get back into bed and go back to sleep.

Oliver slinked back into his bed and pulled the blankets up slightly. Under the thick covers he only seemed smaller and more fragile.

Claire tucked him in and made sure he was comfortable before slowly stepping away and sitting back down on her own bed across the small room. Pillow propped up against the wall, sitting on top of the covers, the dimmest possible light struggling to keep some illumination in that corner of the room. She picked up the book she had set down earlier and looked over at the kid to make sure he was alright.

"What are you reading?" Oliver asked when she made eye contact.

"Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality." It was a dry bit of German text, translated into English by a very capable translator, but when it came to Nietzsche it was often very difficult to make the read more enticing. He had been a fairly dour man. That was not to say that this work of his was widely recognised as a masterwork in contemporary philosophy.

"Will you read to me?" Oliver settled in a bit more.

Claire laughed a bit, she didn't think this would be quite appropriate for the kid, but she also didn't want to temper his philosophical enquiry. "Alright." She smiled before giving a bit more of a stern look, "I'll spare you the professional annotations." She had made quite a few of them in the margins of her book over the past years that she had gone back to this text.
"A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect—more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject", can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything."

When she looked back up from the book she saw Oliver contently snoring in his bed. She didn't know when she had lost him but in reading the passage out loud she had come to some bit of renewed insight on the text and she quickly scribbled another note in the margin regarding the text and then continued to read in silence, with the soft breaths of Oliver a few meters away.